Shamed by cake!

Perfect Humming Bird Bakery Cup Cakes

It seems every woman in the world today is obsessed with baking, in particular cupcakes.

These days, you're considered an under achiever if you haven't founded your own cupcake company by the age of 30.

It's a modern day phenomenon, same as how every woman in the world seems to own a Longchamp holdall.

Back in April I decided to try my hand at baking and made Johan a Lemon drizzle cake for his birthday. It didn't turn out well, it was a grizzly frizzled cake as flat as a pan cake, you can read about that pitiful effort here.

Lemon drizzle fail! 

After this epic baking fail, I was determined not to let baking get the better of me. 

Adding insult to injury is that fact that my Mother is an amazing baker and taught me to bake as  a child. It seemed I was forever cutting pastry and making fairy cakes (the old name for cupcakes).

I tried to style it out with good presentation!

So how could I have forgotten all that my Mother had loving taught me???? 

Well I have forgotten plenty over the years - same as I've forgotten all about
'Representations of gender in 19th century expressionist literature' and other such stuff that was taking up valuable brain space.







I had also recently been gifted the Marian Keyes cook book Saved By Cake. 

I love Marian Keyes, she's a hoot and her cake book is pretty and poignant. She explains how learning to bake helped her manage her manic depression and stopped her from committing suicide.

From that description it doesn't sound like it's a right laugh but it is, she's even manages to make the recipes themselves funny.

Marian's cupcakes 

Marian explains how she had zero baking ability and taught herself from scratch, inspired by this I resolved to master baking.

So I chose a cupcake recipe from Saved By Cake named Consistently Good Cupcakes which Marian states are an easy, fail safe cupcake.

Mine exploded!!!

My evil cupcakes

I made evil cupcakes, pulsating and spewing lumps of cake mix like molten lava all over the oven. 

Getting better but still not great

However, being a tenacious sort I didn't get deterred and stayed up until 1am, until I got a worthy batch.

Johan went to bed leaving me slaving in the kitchen at midnight and thinking his wife was mental!

Through this process of trial and error I gained more confidence and ended up being quite experimental. 


I had an idea to make some sort of red, white and blue Queens Jubilee cupcakes.

Haha finally at 1am!!!

I took Marian's, Red Velvet Swirl cupcakes that have cream cheese frosting baked inside. Unfortunately, I hadn't any red food colouring so I improvised and added a few extra bits of my own.

The result was quite special - a light moist cupcake with Raspberry, Blueberry and vannilla cream cheese baked in side.

See what I did there?! Red, white and blue!

I even used real Madagascan vanilla, which is gorgeous but a massive pain in the bottom. Life's just to short to scrape minute vanilla seeds out of the pod.


Then came the frosting - A calo-rific - artery-clogging-extravaganza of my own invention!!
White chocolate, vanilla butter cream frosting.

 I experimented with both piped and flat spooned frosting styles. I think I actually preferred the flat as it saves the hassle of cleaning the piping bag and nozzle and gives a neat little result.

My conclusion is that baking is exhausting and requires lots of washing up.

Therefore, I shall not be setting up my own cupcake business, sorry to disappoint you all ;-)

OK they're a tad lopsided !

For the next 4 days we subsisted on a diet of only cupcakes as we had so many. 

One day I actually had one for breakfast, lunch, dinner and one for dessert. 

Great diet - a friend pointed out that the Blueberry and Raspberry actually count towards my 5-a-day. 

So with cupcakes in the bag, my next challenge is to create a Swedish Princess Cake - the lightest, most delicious and difficult to make cake in the world! 

I'll keep you posted on my progress.